Research evidence indicates that once an individual has complied to a small request, that person is more likely to comply with a larger and more costly demand made of him in the future -- a phenomenon researchers have called the "foot-in-the-door" effect. In explanation of this effect, it is argued that the person engages in an attributional analysis of his initial compliance and assigns dispositional meaning to his behavior. That is, he comes to see himself as the "kind of person" who takes action of that sort, and his future behavior is shaped by that new self-perception. Two studies are proposed to test this self-perception mediation of the foot-in-the-door effect. Experiment 1 is designed to test the importance of the specific content of the self-perception the person forms. Subjects who agree to participate in a telephone research survey are induced to label their behavior as either "willingness to participate in a survey" or as "help-giving". Those assigned the former label are expected to show a subsequent foot-in-the-door effect only when the second request involves participation in another survey. In contrast, those assigned the latter label are expected to show subsequent foot-in-the-door effects in a much wider range of situations. Experiment 2 presents a new laboratory paradigm for study of the foot-in-the-door effect, with "voluntary" help-giving used as the dependent measure instead of compliance to a direct request for help. The hypothesis is tested that engagement in a complex cognitive task immediately following compliance to an initial request will disrupt the self-perception analysis of that behavior, and thus cause the usual foot-in-the-door effect not to be obtained.